Events

Early Bird Registration is now open! Join us for our fall basic workshop held in-person at Columbia University Irving Medical Center! Come spend the weekend with us in New York for an immersive and intimate introduction to narrative medicine theory and practice! Our intensive workshop content will provide an immersive introductory experience to the methods and skills of narrative medicine and will offer rigorous skill-building in narrative practices. Interactive presentations by Division of Narrative Medicine faculty, including co-authors of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, will combine with group discussions, creative projects, and transformative small group work.  Tuition rates, preliminary schedule, travel information, and details about our discount for cohorts can be found on our event page at the link above! Workshop Description & Objectives Narrative medicine recognizes the aesthetic capabilities of its practitioners as fundamental instruments necessary for effective care. Acts of perception and attention ignite our narrative practice. Seeing, hearing, sensing, taking in that which we witness begins the process toward healing, and narrative medicine training attunes us to those skills within ourselves. We grow toward our own powers to attend to our patients through the schooled avenues of close reading, deep listening, and concentrated witnessing of works of art. This intensive workshop will offer rigorous skill-building in narrative competence and provides an intensive introductory experience to the methods and skills of narrative medicine. These practices are then applicable to unlimited clinical and non-clinical settings. Participants will experience plenary presentations by the founders of the Division of Narrative Medicine and will engage with faculty and each other for interactive presentations, Q&A, and small group work. Participants will learn effective techniques for attentive listening, adopting others’ perspectives, accurate representation, and reflective reasoning. Plenary presentations by faculty open up themes of how stories and art work, exploring concepts such as creativity, ethics, bearing witness, and empathy, while the small groups practice rigorous skills in close reading, creative writing, and responding to the writings of others. Close reading is an integral part of the workshop as is short prompted writing and discussion. Participants will gain access to online resources prior to the start of the workshop where all information necessary and required to prepare for the weekend is provided, including literary texts, film, visual art, and seminar articles in the field of narrative medicine by leading educators. Come work and study with us in-person in New York City for a weekend. Connect with colleagues from the world over to learn the narrative skills of close reading, attentive listening, and creative writing. Find out how your own imagination can reveal things you know unawares. Experience the deep bonds that can form among clinicians and those who care about health care in short periods of small group intensive narrative work. Recognize and be recognized as ones who have care within them.

CUIMC’s LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group in collaboration with CU School of Nursing's Office of Diversity and Cultural Affairs recognizes International Pronouns Day! Join us on Wednesday, October 18th from 11:00am – 12:00pm in room HSC LL108A for our in-person pronouns presentation. This presentation will raise awareness about the use of gender pronouns and how we can continue building a gender-inclusive campus at CUIMC.  Attendees will also have an opportunity to practice using gender pronouns amongst peers. International Pronouns Day began in 2018 and takes place on the 3rd Wednesday of October each year.  International Pronouns Day seeks to make respecting, sharing, and educating about personal pronouns commonplace. Referring to people by the pronouns they determine for themselves is basic to human dignity. Being referred to by the wrong pronouns particularly affects transgender and gender nonconforming people. Together, we can transform society to celebrate people’s multiple, intersecting identities. All staff, faculty and students are welcome to join. Advanced registration is required. 

Overview: Mental health care in NYS and elsewhere in the US and abroad is characterized by persisting disparities/inequities in the availability and quality of mental health care. The reasons for these disparities/ inequities are complex and occur at multiple levels, including at the level of societal structure, healthcare system, mental health program, clinician, and care recipient. This presentation will briefly consider some of the reasons for this complexity and spend most of the time discussing promising strategies for eliminating mental healthcare disparities/inequities.  Learning Objectives: Identify three key contributors to the elevated risk of mental health disparities facing underserved US ethnoracial groups, focusing on the US Latinx community.  Describe a person-centered approach to assessing the impact of these key contributors on mental health disparities.  Discuss five strategies to enhance access to and delivery of mental health services focused on disparity reduction.  Presenter: Dr. Roberto Lewis-Fernández is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of the New York State (NYS) Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence and the Hispanic Treatment Program, and Co-Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, at NYS Psychiatric Institute. He is also Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University. Dr. Lewis-Fernández’s research focuses on developing clinical interventions and novel service-delivery approaches to help overcome disparities in the care of underserved cultural groups. His work centers on improving treatment engagement and retention in mental health and physical health care by persons with anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and other serious mental illnesses. He also studies the way culture affects individuals’ experience of mental disorder and their help-seeking expectations, including how to explore this cultural variation during the psychiatric evaluation. He led the development of the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview, a standardized method for cultural assessment for use in mental health practice, and the Principal Investigator of its international field trial, conducted in Canada, India, Kenya, the Netherlands, Peru, and the United States. Dr. Lewis-Fernández’s research has been funded by US federal and state agencies as well as private foundations. He has published over 170 articles, editorials, commentaries, reports, books, and book chapters on the topic of cultural mental health. RSVP:  Register in advance by clicking the "Reserve Your Seat" button below. 

Our invited speaker for this event is Dr. Oleg Akilov of the University of Pittsburgh, a world-renowned cutaneous lymphoma specialist. The focal point of the meeting will be the review of NYCLC's clinical trials portfolio and basic science projects across various institutions. We will discuss challenges we face even in cases of early-stage cutaneous lymphomas, including recalcitrant cases. We will delve into important topics such as disparities in diagnosis and treatment among patients of different skin types. Informal discussions will follow these sessions.